The Tory Party conference is the place where leading Conservatives get
to "let their hair down" and head off into flights of fancy about giving
the working class/young people/foreigners (delete as applicable) a good
hammering. This is not just to cuddle up to the Torygraph and the Daily
Mail but to square things with the assembled Tory ranks in case they
are needed for election purposes.
The 4th October marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, a momentous event in which the working people of London united to deliver a decisive blow against the menace of British fascism. In this article, Andy Southwark commemorates the brave stand of those workers who fought the Mosleyite thugs, while drawing important lessons for today’s struggles against the English Defence League and BNP.
The 24 hour strike by UNISON members to defend Health and
Education Services in Northern Ireland is an indication of the scale of the
crisis in the public sector. But its also the most significant trade
union struggle to hit the North since the onset of the current economic
crisis.
On Sunday October 2nd, some 40,000 trade
unionists and anti-cuts campaigners took part in a March for the Alternative
through the streets of Manchester city centre to lobby the Tory Party
Conference. Although this was a national TUC organised event it was obvious
that most of those present came from the North and North West of the UK with
only a sprinkling further south from Wales, Bristol and some parts of London.
Back at the start of this year, Socialist Appeal (Issue 193) published a
little item in its ‘Left and Right’ about the so-called Ghost Estates
of Ireland
With the
re-introduction of the emergency law, the military junta is desperately
trying to strangle the revolution and return to the “normality” of the
Mubarak era. But the workers are on the move. The recent upsurge in
strikes and protests could spell the end for the SCAF regime.
The euphoria amongst the Egyptian masses that followed the fall of
Mubarak in February has disappeared. The hard reality of the situation –
in which political, social, and economic conditions have barely changed
– has set in. The revolution has not ended, however, but has, after a
brief lull, transitioned from the streets to the workplaces. The working
class in Egypt – the motor force of the revolution – is organising and
is on the move.
Had the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) leadership been fully conscious of
what their conquest in Shanghai in 1927 really meant, there would have
been no stopping them. The example of Shanghai being taken by the
organised working class, rather than the military forces of the
Guomindang, could have been spread around the country through the CCP
party structures and their network of commanders in the Northern
Expedition from Guangzhou up to Wuhan, Nanchang, Nanjing and Shanghai.
Birmingham council Unison members once again manned the picket lines on 21 September, for a second day of strike action against the Con-Dem council’s threat to impose ‘Martini’ contracts on the authority’s 26,000 workers.
Russian
working class women gained much from the October revolution of 1917 and
the subsequent planned economy that was put in place. Later under Stalin
many of the gains were destroyed, although as the economy developed the
conditions of women also improved. The return of capitalism in Russia
dramatically worsened the conditions of women. How does all this compare
to the current situation working class women are facing in the UK?
Just a few days before the Scottish
Government are to announce details of a series of major spending cuts
to public services, students from around Scotland have occupied the
George Square at Edinburgh University in protest against rising tuition
fees for English, Welsh and Northern Irish students wanting to attend
Edinburgh University.
On March
20th, 1926, another event similar to the assassination of Liao Zhongkai
took place. It laid the basis for the violent coup of Chiang Kai-shek in
Guangzhou, when his mask of democratic revolution slipped. The uneasy
tension between the Guomindang right wing and the CCP comrades inside
the Guomindang broke out into the open.